Google Releases Mobile-Friendly Test API

Written by: Jason Bayless | September 06, 2017

“Nowadays, a majority of users access the Internet via mobile devices. Therefore, having a mobile-friendly and mobile-compatible site is very important for Google. That’s the reason why, to satisfy a request made by many webmasters, Google has announced that their mobile optimization test tool now has its own API.

With this deployment of an API that will test sites on the fly to find out if they are mobile friendly Google has made the lives of webmasters easier. The goal is to automate these kinds of tasks and allow external tools to function more rapidly. We can think of software suites such as SEMrush that could take advantage of this tool to offer more functionality.

Google hopes that this API will facilitate the verification of the mobile compatibility of pages and allow webmasters to solve mobile compatibility problems more quickly. This API has been demanded by webmasters since the release of the latest mobile friendly test tool. Therefore, it is likely to be very widely utilized.

Google hopes that this will help webmasters improve their sites. The API consists of making a query to a URL that will return a result in AJAX with a specific state. The documentation provides an explanation of how to use the API.

This is basically a simple command line query that everyone can utilize. Therefore, you would utilize this in a Linux terminal or a Windows command prompt. You need to get a free key to the API via developers.google.com to authenticate and then use the API.

The most basic method is surely to utilize this API via a command-line query. It is as simple as that, the only thing that remains is to analyze the results. These can indicate how to improve the site and make it mobile friendly. By deploying this simple-to-use API you can analyze sites on the fly to see if they are mobile friendly or not, without having to go through the graphical test tool.

Google is planning to make the page loading speed a factor in page rank for an upcoming update. Google announced on its blog the deployment of this new tool to test the mobile compatibility as well as the speed of loading a web page on desktop and mobile. As part of the aspects of this new tool, Google will send a detailed report of the corrections to be made by email. Google will also give a score between 0 and 100 rating the mobile compatibility of your site. The mobile compatibility is the quality of the experience that users have when they browse your mobile site.

To be mobile-friendly, your site must have appropriately sized buttons, be easy to navigate from a small screen and have the most important information put forward and center. One of the most important metrics is the time it takes to load your site on a mobile device. If a user has to wait too long, they will navigate to another site.

In one place, it is now possible to measure three metrics that previously existed independently. These three metrics are display times of your site on mobile and on desktop and mobile compatibility. The tool allows you to rapidly perform these tests by entering the address of your website.

According to Google, half of the visitors to a site will close a page if it takes more than a few seconds to load and visitors are five times more likely to leave a site that is not optimized. This tool follows efforts that Google has undertaken to promote sites optimized for mobile devices. It is also possible to use the tool to receive a report telling you how to improve a site.”